Tuesday, 6 September 2016

Dead in the Water by Irna van Zyl

Irna van Zyl is a South African journalist, with 30 years in the media trade, and many accomplishments.

Set in Grootbaai, a fictional town near Hermanus and also featuring the Western Cape, this, her first novel, introduces Storm van der Merwe, a suspended detective warrant officer as its protagonist.

It opens with a "car chase" on our SA roads - featuring a bakkie, a beetle and a truck. Plenty of action, and a typically South African scene.

Later, Storm, walking her dog on the beach, finds a body. You can probably predict the rest - especially if I say the words perlemoen(abalone) poaching, shark diving and tow trucks.

All the ingredients, this book, translated from the Afrikaans, had great potential as a crime thriller. The writing was ok - a few moments had me wondering if it was the translation ((this is Moordvis in the vernacular - which sounds way better), or the original text that had some repetitive turns of phrase. For me, it was the lack of character development and personalities that left me not caring what happened to whom. And frustrated, because I so wanted to enjoy it.

Predictable, familiar and ultimately fairly boring, I plodded through this one.

No comments:

From my reading

"That's the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there's something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides to a nice, neat, simple one where one person has done something so horrible and unforgivable that the other person is immediately absolved of all the low-grade sins of sloth, envy, gluttony, avarice and I forget the other three."